Saturday, September 13, 2008

Photo Courtesy of Charlotte MossCharlotte Moss's newest retail venture The Townhouse is closing. Three dazzling floors of "luxury curated environments" filled to the rafters with imported french porcelain, silver, antiques and tons of rare design books opened just a short while ago, in April 2007. What fun it was to escape to the jewel box-- no surface was without a candle, tip towel or stack of notepads. Every detail, down to the staff Carolina Herrera uniforms was taken into account. It's all in the details! Moss will continue with her signature products and her vision of rarified living. The website is full of informative content and accessories so you can still get a fix when you need it....the eight couples with bridal registries might not be as lucky.

The Townhouse is beautiful and my first thought at hearing via a call from a pal in NYC that it was closing was What a tragedy but then I thought about all the people in the path of Hurrican Ike who were probably losing everything they owned at that very minute, and that sort of put things in the proper perspective.

OK, so it's not a tragedy, But it's still a shame, and it will be a big loss for the city, or at least for a certain group. It will be a loss for me, and I'm not even a memeber of that group. It's probably just a matter of unfortunate timing for such a venture. Who could have known three years ago--when Charlotte Moss would have been doing all the heavy planning for this--that the housing market would tank so quickly, that gas prices--and therefore all prices--would climb so high and that people would get nervous and begin to think hard about all sorts of non-essential purchases that they might have made without a pause in, say, 2OO6? In the 198Os, this would have been a huge success. Unfotrtunately, The Townhouse is beautiful, but it can't survive on the sales of fancy notepads & imported soaps, which are all a lot of people seem to feel comfortable buying right now. Too bad. Then again, even Syrie Maugham had to close up her shop during the Depression. Stuff happens. Nothing gold can stay.

One of these days, people will look back and--even though its lifespan was shockingly brief--remember The Townhouse as they do Mortimer's or the Dorotheum at the Met: for those who know it, a mere mention of its name will conjure up a whole lost world. Meanwhile, for anybody who hasn't already been, see it while you can. Magnaverde.

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